Musical interlude

Dumb and dumber

Now that the census decision has gobsmacked the Harper Conservatives just as badly as their prorogation decision six months ago, the discussion is increasingly turning to why in the world they did it.
Scott thinks the goal of the census change was to short-circuit any expansion of social programs:

they are not doing away with the mandatory longform as a way of defending privacy, but as a backdoor way of attacking the programs they hate.

while Chet says the Conservatives want to prevent criticism that their economic policies aren't working:

what Harper really doesn't want is for the census data to show what the effects of his own policies have been in the here and now. Harper appears to like control more than anything else, and there's just no way he can control what a thorough and complete census will tell.

POGGE suggests the basic goal is to make government ineffective:

Harper and his crew take their inspiration from American movement conservatives and Harper himself made that clear long before he became prime minister. . . This is a movement that crosses borders. Its members have been organizing and building out their infrastructure for forty years.

The Georgia Straight also picks up on the American wingnut influence in the census decision:

“You see this attack on the census very much in the American right,” [NDP MP Charlie] Angus said. “It has had no traction here in Canada as far as I can see. I’ve never had a complaint and never heard of this as an issue.". . ."I’ve never gone into a Tim Hortons in Canada and had someone rail at me about big bad government spying on them with the census, but I am hearing this from Conservative cabinet ministers. I think the public is shaking its head.”

The census decision certainly does undermine a internationally respected Canadian agency which may well have been resented by the Harper Conservatives.
But however comforting it is to believe that the Cons had a reason for doing this, I am afraid that maybe they didn't. Like medical isotopes and prorogation and maternal health and party funding and so on and so on, the census decision may well have been just another knee-jerk pander to the base that they didn't really think about very much before they did it.
Basically, I think the Harper Conservatives are increasingly being revealed to Canadians as the gang that couldn't shoot straight. And I think official Ottawa has finally realized how untrustworthy these guys are -- even the Bank of Canada has fired a very public shot across Harper's bow.

Finally

Every time I think the G20 police abuse issue is dying away, it springs to life again.
There are a number of investigations going on into various aspects of the G20 protests, but no one was tasked with looking at police behaviour -- until now.:

The “systemic issues” under investigation [by the Office of the Independent Police Review Director] include allegations of unlawful searches, unlawful arrests, improper detention and issues related to the Eastern Avenue film studio used as a detention centre during the G20 weekend.

And the Toronto Community Mobilization Network is doing its own People's Investigation too -- great idea!
A commenter on a news story has raised an issue I noticed as well -- that the usual media phrasing which describes the G20 protests as "clashes between protesters and police" is wrong. It implies that the protesters were fighting against the police.
But they weren't.
First the police where nowhere to be seen when the Black Bloc was breaking windows and setting fire to police cars:


Then the police were clubbing and arresting peaceful protesters in what were supposed to be safe protest zones:








And more here.

The missing link

Over at The Vanity Press, Chet identifies the crucial connection between getting rid of the mandatory long-form census, and the refusal to hold an inquiry into police abuses during the G20 protests:

. . . both express a preference for ideology over fact, and for authority over responsibility. In both cases, the politicians want to shove away the possibility of finding out a truth that disagrees with their preferred view of things -- you know, the one in which they never did anything wrong and in which they still deserve the power they have?. . .

Oh, I am so glad that Chet is back!

Great line of the day

So they're having this debate in the States about whether some Bush-era "temporary" tax cuts for wealthy people should be allowed to expire and the so-called "fiscal conservatives" are all "we need to keep the cuts for job creation" in spite of the fact that undertaking the cuts in the first place didn't create any jobs -- when, oh lord, will Reagan's inane "trickle-down economics" theory finally be laughed out of court? -- and in spite of the fact that letting the cuts expire will increase government revenue and reduce the US deficit that all the fiscal conservatives claim to be so concerned about.
Anyhoo, John Cole points out the stupidity of all this and concludes:

. . . the best way to get our finances back in order is to systematically ignore anyone who calls himself a fiscal conservative. If I could find a bank run by dirty hippies I would put my money there, because I just don’t trust these people in pinstripes anymore.

G20 Art

At FFIB NAMOL, artist Ffib has posted his interpretation of the "police riot" during the G20

We witnessed on TV and now through more private video and personal testimony the extent of the harassment, brutality, and abuse, including sexual abuse, that was wrought upon law abiding Canadian citizens by a large number of Toronto police officers throughout Saturday & Sunday.
A Police Riot best describes what happened at the Toronto G20.
In any case here is ffibs interpretation of that weekend.

Sigh

I don't understand how anybody ever got the impression that Stephen Harper is such a great manager, as we watch his ministers wreck the agencies they are supposed to be directing.
Now Tony Clement has destroyed the reputation of internationally-respected Statistics Canada and he continues to wiggle around the truth -- after saying for the last week that Stats Canada had endorsed the voluntary long-form census, Clement now sort of admits he was lying and it was the government's decision. In his statement following Shiekh's resignation, Clement says

As I have noted previously [yeah? where?] Statistics Canada's preferred approach would have been to maintain the mandatory long form census.
However, after the Government's decision to replace the mandatory long form census Statistics Canada was asked to provide options for conducting a voluntary survey of households. One of the options provided - the voluntary National Household Survey - was chosen.

Emphasis mine.

Don't panic

Maybe the Obama White House will learn from the Sherrod debacle exactly what all leaders have to learn -- don't panic.
It was panic that made the Obama administration react too quickly, without investigation or due process. So they tried to kill the racism story quick by firing a person who didn't deserve to be fired, and made themselves into a bigger story about poor decision-making.
The moral is, you will be criticized no matter what you do, so do the right thing.

I love the internets

I haven't posted anything about the census long form brouhaha yet but everyone is posting this song tonight.
Andrew Davidson says:

some people can unleash their pent-up creative energy on literally anything.

Skdadl says

So what do Canadians do when the presumptions of the popinjays in Ottawa provoke them to proving once again that we can be a pretty uppity bunch? Well, we write songs, of course. As Tom Lehrer once sort of sang, "They may be winning the battles, but we've got all the good songs."

Considering what a hit the video is, one of the singers notes:

“We should have discussed royalties earlier. Now that it’s taken off this will be a much harder discussion. Statistics say that nine time out of ten, plus or minus one, 80 percent of the time in any group of ten there will be at least one Yoko Ono.”

Getting back to the main issue, this comment on Warren Kinsella's site sums it all up:

Things we all have to do as Canadians:
- pay our taxes
- fill out the census
- register deaths, births, marriages
- be registered in school until you’re 16
No mandatory service, no volunteering, no national population register, no identity card… Christ, we don’t even have to work if we don’t have to, and we’ll get some kind of income support. What is the matter with Canadians? Fewer than half of us seem to be able to pry ourselves away from reality TV even to vote, depending on which type of election we’re talking about.
Lookit- the census isn’t about YOU. It’s about US. Nobody cares about YOUR information. They care about averages, aggregates, trends.

Yes, like the news that that there are 21,000 self-declared Jedi Knights in Canada -- and they're pissed off too!

Shorter

Shorter David Olive column on what some guy told him:

See? The G20 protesters really DID have Weapons of Horse Destruction! They DID! They really DID! We just didn't TELL you about any of this before or SHOW you any of these weapons because ...because ... oh, I know! -- we didn't want them to know we were on to them when we charged our horses needlessly through peaceful crowds. Yeah, that's it...

Black Bloc -- still crazy after all these years

Two articles - here and here - provide an interesting analysis of the Black Bloc protest tactic and what it means for economic and social protest movements around the world.
And this lengthy report appears to have been written by someone who participated in the Black Bloc violence himself during the G20 -- he calls himself Zig Zag.
Far from endorsing the conspiracy theory that Toronto police deliberately let the Bloc run wild on Saturday to justify the billion dollar summit security cost, Zig Zag asserts that police incompetence, lack of maneuverability, and inexperience allowed the Bloc to burn police cars and break windows in spite of its own ineptitude and disorganization -- which were so bad that, if police response had been nimble and smart, most of the Bloc members could likely have been caught when first police car was set on fire.
It was news to me that there were several vandalism incidents across Canada during the week after the summit which the communiques left by the perpetrators indicate were done in solidarity with the G20 Bloc vandalism. Zig Zag lists the following:

In Calgary on the night/morning of June 26/27, an RBC and McDonalds were vandalized . . . On the night/morning of June 27/28, two Bank of Montreal branches were vandalized in Toronto, with windows being smashed and ATM machines being glued . . . On June 30, a Kiewit construction company truck was arsoned in Vancouver, with a communique targeting Kiewit for its work on the Sea-to-Sky Highway expansion as part of the 2010 Olympics, and declaring solidarity with the anti-G20 resistance. . . . On July 1 . . . two RBC branches were vandalized in Montreal . . . On July 2, a Canadian Forces recruiting centre was bombed in Trois-Rivieres (between Montreal and Quebec City).

Also interesting to view the photos in this photo essay as you read Zig Zag's article.

Disconnect

In response to the Toronto police request to send in their videos and photos about the G20 protests., Victoria Times-Colonist journalist Paul Manley says:

The only footage I have of any violence or criminal activity during the G20 protests is of police perpetrating that violence. The police are welcome to that footage but they won't be able to identify many of the perpetrators because the officers were masked and had their badge numbers hidden.

This isn't, of course, what police had in mind at all -- has anyone seen any sign whatsoever that police care how they acted or who they hurt?
Chet and Alison typify the reaction of many Canadians to the "most wanted" swagger. Chet writes:

what we've seen is an enormous mass arrest . . . which seems to have failed to net its ostensible targets, and which violated the civil rights of hundreds of ordinary citizens. This looks to me like an astonishing failure. Yet, all the top officials are swearing up and down that everything's fine.

The disconnect will continue to increase between what the police and politicians are saying about the G20 "thugs and anarchists" and what we are finding out about the ordinary Canadians who got arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the "one-legged anarchist" and the "bubble thug" -- hardly such threats to public safety that they had to be arrested and thrown into cells without phone calls, food or water. Hundreds of Canadians gathered in cities across Canada today to continue the demand a public inquiry, and more stories are being told all the time -- see the Post-G20 Bulletin and G20 Justice.

Amply covered

I'm sure the people whose G20 stories are now being told will be satisfied now that The Globe and Mail has spoken:

The existing reviews amply cover the most contentious policing issues:
The Ontario Ombudsman is investigating the implementation and communication of Regulation 233/10, apparently misinterpreted by some as granting additional police powers. The Toronto Police Service is doing its own review of “all aspects of summit policing.” The Toronto Police Services Board is doing an extensive independent review of the policing operation. An activist coalition is planning its own review. And there is a process to investigate each individual public complaint about police conduct.
With so much police behaviour already under the microscope, a full parliamentary, independent or judicial probe, as demanded by some, is not needed.

Well, its nice to get that settled -- let's not bicker and argue about who killed who...

Why Ignatieff will be Prime Minister

We read story after story about how Canadians don't like Michael Ignatieff, but I don't believe it -- when they see him and listen to him, they like him.
And here's why -- he engages with people, he listens to what people say, and he says what he thinks.
At Susan Delacourt's Toronto Star blog from the Liberal Express bus, she quotes Iggy replying to a question about how the Liberals can regain favour with the national media.

It’s a waste of time in politics to blame the messenger. It is a waste of time to try to manipulate the messenger. These guys have got a job to do. ... (CTV national reporter) Roger Smith is five feet away from me here and he’s got a job to do. And we welcome him here and he can report any darn way he wants. And if I get it wrong, it’s my problem, not his problem. So let’s get out of the Harper mindset, which is: we’ve got to control this, we’ve got to spin this, we’ve got to manipulate this, we’ve got to keep them 45 miles away, we’ve got to set up a roster of which questions get asked and which can’t get asked. If the bus breaks down, we don’t tell them some story. We try to get a replacement bus and try to get them on the bus as soon as possible. And we did. I don’t know any other way to do it, other than ‘what you see is what you get’. And you go to Canadians and you make your pitch.

Try to imagine Stephen Harper ever saying something like that.
Today's news is full of the most recent attempt at ratf**king Ignatieff, the story about how he is going to go and work for the University of Toronto. After yesterday's news was filled with Conservative pearl-clutching. I guess we have all summer to look forward to this.

Great line of the day

On the Facebook page where Toronto police have posted the photos of G20 vandals they are trying to identify a commenter asks

Did you check your staff lounge?

Another commenter posted a link to the G20 Justice site where there are more unidentified photos -- of police.